At 01:57 PM 12/6/97 -0500, Jan de Koning wrote:
>At 12:14 PM 06/12/97 -0600, Glenn wrote among other things:
>
>>I disagree strongly with your placement of blame. I feel that it is the
>>responsibility of the Christian community to provide an apologetic which can
>>withstand the onslaught of data that students are going to face in biology
>>and geology classes. It is not the responsibility of those who disagree with
>>Christianity to cease from advocating their views.
>
>That may be so, but very few parents are competent to talk about these
>things. Unfortunately, many just listen to non-scientific (and I include
>all sciences, incl. theology) discussions. They heard something, and keep
>on repeating it to their children. Those parents may indeed be "blamed"
>but how are you going effectively combat these attitudes?
I said nothing about parents in my above quote. I don't blame the parents.
I blame the Christian apologists who would rather hold to a given theology
than look at what really exists out in the real world. You left out this
from my previous post:
>>It is the fault of many christian apologists and preachers who don't tell
the students the facts and thus make the student vulnerable to the advocates
of atheism who point out this and many more discrepancies between what many
Christian apologists and preachers teach and what actually is.<<
>many are indeed
>really our brothers and sisters. They stop listening as soon as you
>mention the word evolution. For that reason, I think that practically
>speaking Christian High schools are the solution, provided that you can
>find enough qualified teachers.
My youngest son went to a private christain high school. They didn't teach
anything but the YEC stuff. I constantly had to fight this. There were
reasons I felt I had to send my son there but it was not because of the
science curriculum.
>
>>What happens in those classes is that the student finds that what he was
>>taubht about science and the facts is not what the facts actually are. My
>>oft cited simple example of this is the claim by creationists that the
>>entire geologic column does not exist anywhere on earth. This is patently
>>absurd and false.
>
>How are you going to combat this? Just stating it does not change what is
>happening in families and churches.
As I said above, I blame the Christian apologists who do not do their
homework before publishing their books. As for me, I am doing what I can.
It has been very difficult for me to get anything published. It took me 3
years from the writing of my article before it finally found acceptance at
PSCF. Several other journals rejected it out of hand. When the Christian
press will not publish you, what are you to do? So I turned to the Internet
and self-publishing to try to get some of the information out about the
factually erroneous stuff that Christians teach. I will give you an example
from a man who recently posted on this list, John Wiester. He wrote:
"We have no way of knowing with certainty if Neanderthal man could
talk. His brain cavity size was not only equal to but exceeded that of
modern man. However, he reportedly lacked the frontal lobe, the speech
center of our modern brain."John Wiester, The Genesis Connection,
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983), p. 180
This is patently false. Neanderthals have brains almost identical to ours
and this has been known for over a century. The minor differences are due to
changes in skull shape. Why Wiester taught this I don't know. He gives no
reference for such a silly statement. Yet when a student, believing Wiester,
takes an anthropology course in college and learns that Wiester was so
incredibly wrong, what is he to think about the rest of what Wiester wrote?
Neanderthals have a frontal lobe.
Another example. What happens when a student believing Phillip Johnson
learns that a rodent was NOT the ancestor of the whale as Johnson states
(Darwin on Trial p. 87) What is wrong with so many Christian apologists that
we present so many factually incorrect items to the laity and then are
unwilling to correct them?
>I am not a geologist, and do not want to debate the issue. I notice
>however, that all these columns are found in the northern hemisphere. Does
>that mean anything?
it means nothing as to the existence of the rocks of all geologic ages in
the correct order in all of these places. The creationist claim is NOT that
there are no complete geological columns in the Southern Hemisphere which
would be true), but that there are no complete geological columns
anywhere(which is patently false). That is the point I am making. If the
entire column only existed in one place on earth, the YEC claims would be false.
>
>>It is the fault of many christian apologists and preachers who don't tell
>>the students the facts and thus make the student vulnerable to the advocates
>>of atheism who point out this and many more discrepancies between what many
>>Christian apologists and preachers teach and what actually is.
>
>Again, I do not deny that, but what can be done about it? Teaching science
>course at all seminaries? Even that is not sufficient, I am afraid.
As I said, I am doing what I can. But until Christianity ceases to play the
TC games(Theological Correctness in the same sense as Political correctness)
the battle won't be won. It is Theologically Incorrect to believe in
evolution.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm